In this video, we're going to unbox, set up, and run your first cut with the xTool S1 and xTool Studio. If you've already unboxed your S1 and looking to start the cutting tutorial, skip to this timestamp floating here. Let's get into it.

Go ahead and open up your box. Remove the top layers of all of your packaging, as well as the honeycomb panel that we'll be cutting on and the green box, which contains your instruction manual and setup guide. Inside, you also find these straps. These are wrapped all the way around your laser cutter, and they're a handy way to lift it out of the box and onto your bench. This thing is about 20 kilos, so a two-person lift here might be helpful. Once it's out, go ahead and remove the straps and the remaining bits of foam, the outer layers of plastic, as well as the little bits of tape with the yellow tags on them, and all the little bits of, you know, protective plastic that you can find on this thing. Inside your machine, you'll find more stuff. On top, you'll find your materials pack with some plastics and woods to get cutting with, as well as your exhaust tube, your accessories box, your air assist pump and air tubing that goes with it, and most importantly, your laser unit. Remove all the bits of foam from inside of your machine.

Speaking of inside the machine, at the back, you'll find two of these little white blocks out there just holding your gantry in place to prevent it from moving while you know it's in transport. In the accessories box, you'll find your toolbox, which contains a little hex screwdriver to undo the bolts on these and remove them. If there is a screw on your machine, chances are this screwdriver will fit, so do not lose it. Once they're removed, you should be able to slide your rail forward. Cut off the cable ties, being careful not to cut anything else as well, and remove that protective covering. Now, grab your laser unit and plug in the air hose, as well as the connector cable into the side of it. On the back of your laser unit will be a little notch. This notch lines up with the holes in the rail mount. And it should just sit in there nicely. In your toolbox, you'll find two screws that go into the top of the head like so. And this will hold your laser unit in place. Once mounted, it should spring up and down nicely like so. In your toolbox, you'll also find your distance probe. This just magnetically attaches to the side of the laser unit like so.

Looking at the rear of your machine, you will find an exhaust vent. Now, cutting produces a whole heap of nasty gases and particles that aren't good to breathe, and they can also smell. You know, the room gets a bit funky. Because of that, you'll need a way to either vent that air outside or run it through an appropriate filter to filter everything out. If you take the four screws off this vent, you can put on the exhaust chew hose that came with your machine. You just need to put the four screws back in to hold it into place. Now, there is a little fan behind that exhaust vent to blow out the smoke. However, you may find that to be a little bit underpowered when trying to use the hose to vent the air outside. So, an inline fan to help push that through might be smart. We instead are going to be using the AP2 air filter that we use with our F2 Ultra. This is a great little bit of kit and it filters the exhaust enough to blow the air, you know, directly back into the room. If you have one, we have some instructions in our F2 Ultra video on setting it up. Regardless, though, of what solution you're using, go ahead and set up your air extraction or filtering system or whatever.

Now, there is another air system we need to set up, and that is the air assist. This little box is just an air-blowing box, like an air compressor. Connect the air hose tubing into the rear of the air assist and run it into the air hose port on the rear of your machine. Then, go ahead and use the included accessory cable to connect the air assist to one of your accessory ports on the back of your cutter. Now, there is a power input on your air assist. Do not worry about this. it will receive enough power through that accessory cable. You don't need the external power supply brick. Also, ensure that you switch it to auto mode. This will allow your laser to control the air assist by turning it off and on and setting the power and whatnot. It just lets it, you know, control it automatically. Why do we need this air pump? Well, the air assist runs through the laser unit and blows the air around the laser cutting head. This forms like a shield of air that helps keep gunk from building up in the lens and, you know, helps keep smoke away to give you a cleaner cut and engrave.

In your toolbox, you'll also find this little USB key. This is your safety key. And if it's not plugged into the back of your machine, it will not turn on. So, go ahead and whack that in the key slot on the back. And finally, we can go ahead and plug in our power supply and turn the machine on. Now, on the side of the machine is an estop. This is your emergency kill switch for when you need to turn the machine off in a hurry or an emergency. If you give it a twist, it'll pop up and turn the machine on. Your S1 at this point should turn on and come to life. Carefully slip your honeycomb panel into the bottom of your machine. And with that, your xTool S1 is ready to go.

All righty. Let's now go ahead and actually do some test cuts and engravings with it. To do so, you'll need to install a piece of software called xTool Studio, which is the software that takes our designs and tells our machine how to actually cut them out. So, go ahead and install that. Let's jump over to xTool Studio. Once you're in xTool Studio, you can go ahead and create a new project. Plug in your laser cutter via USB, and you should be able to connect to it under devices at the top right here. Now, the first time you do this, it may run through a first-time setup sequence. This will likely involve a short laser safety video, a firmware update, which is very much worth doing, as well as a first-time cutting tutorial that teaches you how to use xTool Studio. If this is your first time in xTool Studio, it is most definitely worth doing that tutorial. Regardless, once you're done running through that first-time setup, go ahead and create a new project because we're going to be designing, engraving, and cutting a little name tag key ring from scratch just as a nice little, you know, first or second project. xTool Studio can take our designs and convert them into instructions for the machine, but it's also got some basic drawing tools, which is what we're going to be using here. On the left, we have our creation and drawing tools. In the middle, we have our canvas, which is actually the same size as our laser cutting bed. And on the right, we have our laser settings.

We're going to go ahead to the shapes tool here, select a rectangle, and we're just going to draw one. Doesn't really matter how big it is. Now, zooming in a little bit, if we select this rectangle here, you can see another menu pop up at the top here. This one is related to the shape or the tool or whatever you're doing right now, and it's got settings specific to that. We're going to go ahead and use this menu to set the size of our name tag. I want mine to be 30 mm wide. So, I'll go ahead and set that up here. But you'll see that if I try and change the height here to 10 mm, the width will also change. That's because we've got the lock aspect ratio on here. here. If we turn it off, you can see that we can scale it, you know, and warp it up and down or left and right or something like that. And if we turn it on, you'll see that it scales everything nice and uniformly. So, we'll turn it off, which will let us set any dimensions we want. We'll go 10 mm wide and 10 mm high, like so. Beautiful. Next, go ahead and create a 4 mm wide circle using the exact same steps as before. And we're just going to place it roughly in the side here. This is where we're going to put, you know, our key ring through our keychain. Now, we can go ahead and use the text tool on the side here to write out our name and actually turn it into a name tag. That is way too big. So, we're going to go ahead and use our menu up here to set the size of the text. Uh, let's give I think 40 a go. Oh, and we'll just go ahead and line that up like that. You can go ahead here and set the font and the size of it and just play with it till you're happy with what you've got. Now, we're going to do something a little bit funky here and round the edges of our rectangle. To do so, we're going to select our rectangle and go ahead up to the radius here, and we'll just set that to three. Yeah, that looks about good. If you really want to get good at using X tool studio, explore all the settings up here because there's a lot of cool things like this that you can do with the tools.

Now, if you want, you can go ahead and go through all of these menus and explore other shapes and patterns that you can add to the tag as well, but we're going to leave it at this and go ahead and start assigning our cuts. Starting off, we need to tell xTool Studio what we're actually cutting this out of. So, to do so, we're going to go up to our material here. And we're just going to search for Oh, it's right there. 3mm basswood ply. This is that sheet of plywood that should have come with your materials pack. So, we'll select it and we'll go ahead and apply it. Now, let's select this rounded rectangle here. This is what we're going to cut out to actually create our tag. So, all we're going to do is tell XL Studio we want to cut this out. We're then going to go ahead and select the key ring hole and we're going to tell XTOL Studio we want to cut that out as well. And we'll select our name and we'll say, hey, we actually want to engrave this. And as you can see, it goes solid because we're engraving it. Once we have our operations assigned, if we click somewhere on the canvas that's not an element, we can see on the right-hand side here that there's a nice little sanity check of, you know, hey, here's what we're actually going to be cutting under these settings. And as you can see, we've got our rectangle and our hole, and here's what we're going to be engraving. Nice little, you know, breakdown to just double-check that everything's right before we go ahead.

Now, I'm going to show you something really cool here. If we select our engraves, we can see a few key settings with power and speed being the most important. Power is how much of the laser's power you're actually using and speed is how fast that laser should move to perform this cut or engrave. Usually when you get a new material, you have to run a bunch of tests to find a good combination of these two that work. If the power's too low or the speed's too high, it's not going to engrave or cut nicely. And if the power is too high or the speed's too low, you're going to probably burn your material. However, when we started by selecting the material, XTOL Studio gave us some known good values for these power and speed settings. In fact, if you press this button here, you can actually see the test that they performed to get the good results. And each of these, by the way, is a button that you can choose if you want one of these settings. We're going to leave it on that because it's nice and we don't want crispy or too light. So, we'll just exit out of it. There is one more important thing that we might want to change on here and this is a setting that you know it's very important to learn as a beginner and that is lines per centimeter. Now this only applies to engraves. When your machine goes ahead and actually does an engrave, it kind of scans backwards and forwards and builds up the engraving line by line. This lines per centimeter here is just the resolution that you're actually going to be engraving at. The higher it is, the higher quality is, but it will take more time to engrave. We're going to go ahead and set it to the maximum of 300 lines per centimeter because we want the maximum resolution here. And in a situation like this where we've got a pretty small engrave going on, it's probably only going to add about 30 seconds to the job time. After you go ahead and cut this one out, try one with 90 lines per centimeter, which is the default to just see an example of the difference cuz it is quite day and night. Next, go ahead and place your plywood sheet in your cutter. Where you put it really doesn't matter. Now, our canvas in xTool Studio is a virtual representation of our cutting bed in our machine.

So, now we need to select and drag our file and place it where we kind of put our wood in our machine. Now, this is a lot easier than it seems. We don't have to make any guesswork here. And the first step of this is to set the focus of the laser. Open your lid and move the laser head by hand until that little cross beam is hovering over your wood. Then go ahead and select auto measure. And the machine will move and measure the height of your wood here. You should get a value around this. Next, we're going to go ahead and mark our processing area. And we'll select a square here. This is a really cool function of the machine. And I'll explain what we've done after we've actually done it. Move the gantry so that that laser aligns with the one corner of your wood. Then press the button on the front of your machine. Next, align the laser to the opposite side of your wood and press the button on your machine again. Then hit end marking and done. If you now look at your X Tool Studio canvas, you'll see that these points have been overlaid and this lets you virtually see where your piece of wood is so that you can line up your design on it. This is such a great tool and it's pretty precise. And if you're engraving on keychains or coasters or other little, you know, bits of bobs, it is incredibly helpful. So, utilize it when you can. And now we are ready to cut. So, go ahead and hit process. At the top, we should get a little estimation of the total job time and also a preview of our job in the middle here. Go ahead and check that out when you've got time. And if everything looks good, we can go ahead and hit start. Once it's been sent to the machine, press the button on the front to start the job. And it will start cutting.

Now, very important, as with any laser cutter, never let it run unattended. If your machine starts a fire, it will start really small and be very easy to extinguish. We have a little spray bottle of pure water on hand to put it out. If you open up the lid, the laser will stop and you can just squirt it out. Thankfully, this is a quick job though, and once it's done, you can now pull out your name tag that you designed and manufactured in what, like 5 minutes. That is a pretty darn cool thing to be able to do in the comfort of your own home. And that is your first piece done. The steps we outlined here are pretty much the gist of how most jobs are going to go. So, we hope that it equipped you with what you need to get out and start cutting things that you want to cut. If you want to do a really cool party trick, it's always super impressive to engrave on the slate stone coasters that came with your material pack. If you do a quick search on atom.com, which is xTools design repo site, you can find a whole bunch of projects using these to follow along with. Maybe do a few cuts on the wood first and then do the slate coasters because they're a bit more expensive and you've only got two of them. Well, that about wraps us up. If you need a hand with anything we covered in this guide or you just made something cool with this, feel free to head on over to our community forums and post about it. We're all makers over there and happy to help. Until next time, happy making.